Successful treatment of cancer often relies on surgery, which in turn depends on the accuracy of the detection and imaging tools available to the surgeon. Of the non-skin cancers diagnosed every year in the U.S., most (˜50%) are cured by surgical resection. Only a small percentage of patients are cured by radiation therapy and chemotherapy, while the remainder are incurable. At present, patients undergoing planned cancer surgery with a curative intent depend upon pre-operative imaging techniques such as computer tomography (CT) scans, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and positron emission tomography (PET) scans for cancer detection. This pre-operative imaging is usually able to detect the primary tumor or tumors, but often fails to indicate the extent of metastasis. A technique is needed to provide the surgeon with real-time, dynamic, intraoperative information that could ultimately impact decision-making in the operating room (OR).
Accurate assessment of resection margins and detection of occult disease (including affected lymph nodes) during surgery is known to reduce recurrence rates and improve long-term patient outcomes. Of particular interest are detection techniques with the potential to be developed into intraoperative tools that could be used in the OR. Accordingly, development of an intraoperative probe is vital in the precise identification of occult tumor and for the evaluation of the adequacy of surgical resection margins in the OR, both of which presently rely on frozen sections and post-operative pathological examination. Such a technique could also serve to advance image-guided pathology.